Soup, Sabotage, and Spectacle Activism

I’ve been around liberal activism for most of my life. Specifically, I’m very familiar with what you might call “Liberal Protest Activism”(LPA for short). This is the kind of protest where you gather to demonstrate the numbers and determination of your movement, and to call for the government to make a change in response to popular pressure. In a lot of ways, it’s the main form of activism that’s viewed as “acceptable” within our society. In some sectors it’s the only form of activism that’s considered at all effective, which is something I used to believe.

You know the story – Ghandi’s movement was able to win freedom for India and Pakistan, M.L.K.’s movement was able to end Segregation and bring about racial equality. Anything that hints at violence, or that damages property or interferes with business is out of line and counterproductive.

In reality, both of those movements had militant elements, and took place within broader geopolitical contexts that had as much influence as any peaceful protest – probably more.

But within the framework of LPA, spectacle is extremely important, and there are a lot of different opinions about how to do it “right”. Some people think that the more “respectable” the conduct of the protesters, the better the optics, and the more likely that others will join in. Others think that doing silly, loud, or dramatic things will draw more media attention, and stir more conversation about the issue. There are also some who believe that a sincere demonstration of their sincerity, love, or faith will move other people on a spiritual level, and protests can become a sort of ritual.

In a lot of ways, this is the same as the arguments atheists have had about how we should defend or promote our unbelief. Should we mock religious beliefs and practices that seem silly to us? Should we be respectful and patient, and avoid ruffling any feathers? What tone is the most likely to get people to overcome their prejudices and listen?

My view on both of these arguments is the same. Different approaches will work on different people, at different points in their lives. There is room for a wide variety of approaches, and that’s what we should expect for such a strange and diverse species as humanity. More than that, I defy anyone to make a compelling case that it’s even possible to get everyone to agree on messaging and tactics. That’s not what humans are. Some will definitely go for uniforms, planned messages, and so on, but trying to get everyone to do the same thing feels a bit like saying that if everyone just agreed with me, then the world would be doing fine.

That may or may not be the case, but it’s largely irrelevant, because that’s not how people work.

This is not me saying there’s no point in trying to convince people of things. I hope this doesn’t need saying, but if I believed that, this blog would not exist. I just don’t think that I can persuade everyone. I don’t even think that I can persuade anyone by myself, I’m just trying to be part of the process that moves some people in the right direction.

In that same spirit, while I don’t think that LPA is sufficient to change the world in the ways we need to change it, I do think it’s a valid part of a larger movement. For myself, I’m fairly uncomfortable with theatrics, and I have a hard time persuading myself that dressing up and dancing around or something like that is worth the effort. My preference has been to find conversations about theatrical protests, and try to direct them towards the issue the protest is about. They did their job by making people talk, and now it’s my turn to make something useful of that conversation. If people are going to be doing silly and dramatic things, then the media is going to focus on that. It just makes sense to try to make use of that attention while it’s there, and it’s not like I can stop people from doing that stuff anyway.

Which brings us to the recent decision of a couple activists to throw tomato soup on a glass-protected Van Gogh painting and glue themselves to a wall.

Was this useful? Not particularly, but within the framework of LPA, it fits. No real damage was done, and it certainly generated a lot of buzz. The thing is – while I believe some people are genuinely upset at the disrespect shown to a great work of art, I don’t actually believe that anyone’s seriously changing their mind about climate change because of it. If someone’s opinion on whether or not climate action is necessary is swayed by two kids throwing soup at a painting, then I don’t know that it’s worth trying to discipline a global movement specifically for that person’s benefit. I also don’t see a lot of point in saying “they don’t represent all of us”, because I don’t think anyone believes they really do. Some may pretend to believe it because they already opposed the movement, but those folks will also believe that people are going to give their kids free drugs. Trying to appease them doesn’t seem worth the effort to me.

So my initial reaction was to point out that more conventional protest has not resulted in adequate climate action thus far.

I still think that’s the case.

We’ve certainly made progress. Renewable energy is booming around the world, and that is slowing the rate at which annual emissions are increasing. At the same time, emissions are still increasing, and people are dying because of climate change now.

If you think the action that’s been taken to date is adequate, then I have to question to what degree you value human life.

That said, my initial response was wrong, at least in one way. I think it was a holdover from my fairly recent days of believing in the efficacy of this kind of protest, combined with a lack of new reflexes for a different approach. See, from what I can tell, a majority of the world – even in Western countries – believes there’s a need for more action on climate change. If I have a role in redirecting the attention from activism like this, it probably should be to try to get people talking more about organizing and direct action. What we’re lacking isn’t a desire for change, but the tools for change. If conventional protest doesn’t work, what does work? Doing stranger more offensive forms of protest amounts to trying to do more of the thing that’s not working, in the hopes that “more” is what’s needed.

What I probably should have done in response to this was work on updating my direct action post, since it’s overdue for a tune-up, and trying to have a conversation about more effective forms of activism.

There’s been some discussion around whether or not Just Stop Oil is actually trying to undermine the climate action movement, but while I think that’s worth investigating, it shouldn’t be the basis for how we react to any given action by them. The reality is that there are people trying to sabotage that movement, and there will be for any movement that’s trying to get large-scale change. There will be corporate infiltrators. There will be government infiltrators. We should be on guard against that, but I don’t think that means trying to find and expose every single one. That seems like a futile effort, and a great way to create division and enmity within any movement.

The focus, rather, should be on what goals we want, what tactics we want to use, and making sure everyone understands why a group wants to do things a certain way for a certain action. What material effect will a given action have? If there’s a media buzz around something like this soup-throwing protest, is that something we should try to use, or should we just ignore it and focus on what we were already doing?

As I’m fond of saying, I don’t have all the answers, I’m just trying to figure out some of them. I don’t think this protest was helpful, but neither do I think there’s much point in getting worked up about it. Personally, I shouldn’t have given in to my reflex to defend this one in the way that I did. I think the best conversation for me to try having next time something like this happens, is about what kinds of activism would actually work.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Combatting the frustration of slow change in a time of crisis

I talk a lot about the need for rapid systemic change, and I sometimes worry that I don’t do a good enough job drawing a line between the kinds of individual action for which I advocate, and the scale of change that I want to see in the world. I’ve been hoping for something to help build a sort of social momentum on climate change for a long time. Back in 2011 or so, I started advocating for members of the New England Quaker community who could, to contribute to a loan fund so members of that community could get zero-interest loans for stuff like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and so on. The idea was to have people pay back the loan out of savings on their power bills (always assuming they could afford to), and then contribute a little extra, as able, to grow the fund and help the next person. Ideally, over time, the number of people helped by that project would grow, and the speed at which they could make change would increase. There have definitely been a number of group efforts on solar panel installation since then, but I don’t know if anything that organized ever cropped up.

Since then, as you may have noticed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to address the systemic problems that are blocking climate action, but that basic principle remains the same – if you have the patience to do things right at the beginning, you build a movement that’s flexible, hard to eradicate, and capable of achieving great things seemingly overnight. Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay that discussed similar topics a while back, and she recently shared this cartoon illustrating a section of that essay.

For those of you who can’t see it, the image in the tweet is three horizontal, rectangular panels, arranged vertically under the title, “Mushroomed:”. The top panel has a picture of a single mushroom, the second shows several in a cluster, and the third shows a cross-section of the soil, revealing all of those mushrooms to be part of the same organism lying beneath the soil. The images are accompanied by the following excerpt from Solnit’s essay:

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus.

The passage in question then goes on to make the metaphor explicit:

Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Right now we’re at the foundation-laying stage. We’re forming those underground connections (called “hyphae“, if you’re interested), and extending our ability to interact, pool resources, and plan for the future. For me, this process is frustrating, and painfully slow, but it’s important to recognize that the small actions we take can be part of much larger change, especially of those actions are made with the larger change in mind. Altering consumer choices is an “individual change”, but it’s one that has proven itself to be incapable of supporting the more dramatic change that we need. To switch back to the building metaphor, it’s a weak foundation. It might support a small shack above, but any attempt at something bigger will collapse.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Let’s talk about Labor Day’s origins…

Two posts today! How exciting!

For those of you who don’t know, because of the relentless drive to crush left-wing thought and politics in the United States, that country (and Canada, because of course) celebrates Labor Day on the first Monday of September. The decision to have it then rather than on May 1st, when everyone else celebrates Labor Day, was almost certainly made to avoid tying the holiday to the global struggle for workers’ rights.

As usual, Beau gives a good overview of the history, and includes a point that I think we would all do well to remember. Too often, when we celebrate victories or “heroes” of the past, we place those people and events on pedestals. On the one hand, I get the desire to do that, but it lowers those of us living today by comparison. The reality is that people are just people, and our role in the labor movement today is just as important as any worker of the past. The fight continues, and the idea that it’s a thing of the past – as with every other movement for change – is just an effort to protect the status quo.

“Labor day is for you.“

Man the tredges! We must protect children from air pollution!

Every once in a while, I like to talk about the benefits of incorporating plant life in and our buildings and cities. In addition to the mental health benefits, which I think are reason enough, there’s ample evidence that more plant life can reduce the harmful effects of air pollution. This is another one of those times when it’s so obvious something’s a good idea, I find it perplexing that more cities aren’t investing more heavily in urban vegetation. I know a great many cities around the world have been doing just that, but as ever, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

So, here’s some more evidence that we should have more plants around us:

A team of researchers led by Barbara Maher, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University, and supported by Groundwork Greater Manchester, installed ‘tredges’ (trees managed as a head-high hedge) at three Manchester primary schools during the summer school holidays of 2019.

One school had an ivy screen installed, another had western red cedar and the third school had a mixture of western red cedar, Swedish birch and an inner juniper hedge. A fourth school, with no planting, was used as a control.

The school with the ivy screen saw a substantial reduction in playground particulate matter concentrations, but an increase in black carbon. The playground with the mixture of planting saw lower reductions in air pollution to that of the western red cedar.

The biggest overall reductions in particulate matter and black carbon were shown at the school with western red cedar planted. The results showed almost half (49%) of black carbon and around 46% and 26% of the fine particulates, PM2.5 and PM1 emitted by passing traffic were captured by the western red cedar tredges.

The tredges also significantly reduced the magnitude and frequency of acute ‘spikes’ in air pollution reaching the playgrounds.

Professor Maher said: “Our findings show that we can protect school playgrounds, with carefully chosen and managed tredges, which capture air pollution particulates on their leaves. This helps to prevent at least some of the health hazards imposed on young children at schools next to busy roads where the localised air quality is damagingly poor, and it can be done quickly and cost-effectively.”

I could never have predicted that becoming a writer would one day lead me to learning the word, “tredges”. That said, I’m not surprised that I’m learning about this from researchers in England.

It seems pretty clear that this is a good investment. It also seems like the kind of thing that parents interested in direct action could band together to demand, or even just do. I’m not speaking from experience, but I expect this would be hard for local politicians to oppose, and easy to unite parents around, regardless of ideology. There may be parents out there who wouldn’t support better health for their children, but I doubt there are many.

There are a lot of small things that most communities are capable of doing for themselves, but that don’t get done. I think at least some of that is people just not realizing that they have the resources they need, but a lot of it is the likelihood that any good will be undone by the system that’s supposed to be working for us. Where that system is working against us, it may be worth doing something like – in this case – putting up a hedge, without waiting for permission. If one were to do that, I imagine it would be best to have signs attached to it, explaining what it’s for, and encouraging people to fight to keep it. Even if one lost such a fight in the short term – if the hedge (or tredge) is destroyed because the right paperwork wasn’t filled out, then that would become something around which you could rally support.

There are a lot of problems in the United States caused by activist parents making noise at school board meetings and other such local political events. This seems like a way to activate people in a more constructive direction by using similar tactics (assuming that getting your tredges isn’t as easy as I think it ought to be). Getting a hedge put between a play area and a road is a small enough change that I think most people will believe that it’s within reach, which will make them more likely to put in the effort to make it happen. I also believe it that the conversation about the benefits of greenery for children could fairly easily be turned to conversations about air pollution and greenery in general, waging a campaign like that could well make people think about what other things they could accomplish by working together. I don’t know whether good fences really make good neighbors, but good tredges definitely make better neighborhoods.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Fun direct action against corporate energy waste

It’s been said before that the French have a lot to teach U.S.ians about protesting. For all folks back home love to claim that the United States is “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, to quote our obnoxious national anthem, it seems to take a lot more for people to take to the streets. What’s more, those few who do directly fight back when the police attack tend to be condemned as a radical minority that “goes too far”.

For contrast, here’s French firefighters responding to police attempts to put down their fight for better treatment:

Now, we’ve got another bit of direct action that’s available to anyone with the requisite athletic ability, and doesn’t even require fighting police.

Have you ever walked through a city at night, and noticed lots of business signs are still lit up, even though the businesses are closed?

Have you ever thought about how much electricity is wasted, and carbon dioxide emitted, just to keep those lights on?

Does it feel like the status quo has us begging our overlords to let us save ourselves, while being forced to watch them keep screwing us over because they can’t be bothered to act like decent human beings?

Well, a group of French activists are once again showing us the way, in an action that is not only direct and effective, but I would say is also rather hard to argue is doing any harm that would merit a societal reprimand.

They’re unplugging or switching off those signs.

Honestly, I only see one downside – it seems like this might save money for the businesses in question, and they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t deserve to have that money. This is right up there with wheatpasting or tearing down fascist propaganda (always use your keys, they sometimes hide razors behind their posters) as a method of direct action that’s within reach of most people.

Being able to do parkour obviously makes this sort of thing easier and faster (speed is important if you’re doing something and you don’t want to have unpleasant conversations), but it seems like careful use of a long stick or slower climbing could work just as well.

As I keep saying, the people in charge, at every level, very clearly don’t see climate change as an emergency. They don’t seem to feel any urgency about it at all, except perhaps for some concern over how they’ll keep the rabble in line as climate change starts killing us off.

Businesses and governments have been chiding us for years for not turning our lights off enough, and I think it’s past time to turn that advice back on them.

 

It’s getting hotter, faster, and that trend is going to continue. After a certain point, drastic action is all that is left.

Apparently I meant to write about this back in September, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, I wasn’t able to make myself post daily back then. It’s not anything particularly new, but it’s important to keep in mind when thinking about politics, and about any plans we might have for the future. A little over a decade ago, I was part of a “climate working group” organized by myself and fellow New England Quakers. At that point in time, it seemed pretty clear that the biggest obstacle to direct action within our religious community, was that people honestly did not grasp the severity of the problem. However bad you think public understanding of the issue is now, it was much, much worse back then. I remember people who considered themselves environmental activists talking about preventing it from warming, and going back to normal, at a time when I was reading regular reports about ecosystems shifting around us, and feedback loops starting up.

So, we put together a presentation. We talked about why climate change was important to us personally, because that kind of framing tends to get through to people. And we played this video:

And then we talked about solutions. My goal at the time was to the community to lead by example. To pool their resources, and get every member of the community off of fossil fuels one at a time. I still think it was something that could have been done (the money was there, had its owners cared to spend it), and I know many members of the community have put up solar panels, installed batteries, and so on since then. But the contents of this video – especially the feedback loops it discusses – were new to a lot of people, and I remember being told that if I talked about things like storing food for emergencies, it’d just sound over the top and turn people off. Maybe that was right, I don’t know, but it didn’t sit right then or now. In case I haven’t mentioned it recently, having a store of food for emergencies is more than just buying extra food. It is that, but you need to use that food at the same time, and cycle through it so none of it is on the verge of spoiling when a crisis hits. You also want to be able to cook with the food you’ve set aside, and live on it. If it’s rice and beans, learn how to make it enjoyable, and add those spices to your store of food. If there’s a crisis, you don’t want to be figuring out how to make your food edible on top of whatever else is going on. It’s an actual skill that most people – myself included – aren’t very good at these days. Practice it now, so you’ll have that resource when you actually need it.

Because for all things seem bad now, it is almost certain that the rate of warming is going to increase over the next couple decades, and that is not going to be a pleasant experience for us, because our rulers have thus far refused to prepare.

James Hansen, a climate scientist who shook Washington when he told Congress 33 years ago that human emissions of greenhouse gases were cooking the planet, is now warning that he expects the rate of global warming to double in the next 20 years.

While still warning that it is carbon dioxide and methane that are driving global warming, Hansen said that, in this case, warming is being accelerated by the decline of other industrial pollutants that they’ve cleaned from it.

Plunging sulfate aerosol emissions from industrial sources, particularly shipping, could lead global temperatures to surge well beyond the levels prescribed by the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as 2040 “unless appropriate countermeasures are taken,” Hansen wrote, together with Makiko Sato, in a monthly temperature analysis published in August by the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Declining sulfate aerosols makes some clouds less reflective, enabling more solar radiation to reach and warm land and ocean surfaces.

I’ve written about this before, and it’s important to keep in mind. It’s one of the reasons that I think we need to consider geoengineering, even though it’s an extreme and dangerous thing to do. I don’t know the exact accuracy of the forecasts of civilizational collapse within 30 years – I don’t think anyone can know that for sure, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility. If we don’t change direction, I fear it’s more likely than not.

Since his Congressional testimony rattled Washington, D.C. a generation ago, Hansen’s climate warnings have grown more urgent, but they are still mostly unheeded. In 2006, when he was head of NASA’s GoddardInstitute for Space Studies, George W. Bush’s administration tried to stop him from speaking out about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

After 46 years with NASA, Hansen left in 2013 to focus on political and legal efforts to limit warming. His granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is one of 21 young plaintiffs suing the U.S. government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to take adequate action to address the human causes of climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, industry and electricity generation.

In Hansen’s latest warning, he said scientists are dangerously underestimating the climate impact of reducing sulfate aerosol pollution.

“Something is going on in addition to greenhouse warming,” Hansen wrote, noting that July’s average global temperature soared to its second-highest reading on record even though the Pacific Ocean is in a cooling La Niña phase that temporarily dampens signs of warming. Between now and 2040, he wrote that he expects the climate’s rate of warming to double in an “acceleration that can be traced to aerosols.”

That acceleration could lead to total warming of 2 degrees Celsius by 2040, the upper limit of the temperature range that countries in the Paris accord agreed was needed to prevent disastrous impacts from climate change. What’s more, Hansen and other researchers said the processes leading to the acceleration are not adequately measured, and some of the tools needed to gauge them aren’t even in place.

The article goes on to talk about aerosols, and how we know what we know, but I want to shift focus to something else.

I think it is very important to understand that the warming between here and 2 degrees will likely do a lot more damage than did the warming that got us here. First off, as the video at the top mentioned, there are a number of feedback loops that are also accelerating the warming, even without the monkey’s-paw consequences of reducing pollution. The warming we see over the next couple decades will be piling on top of already-collapsing glaciers and already-burning ecosystems. I think that means that we’re in for a couple decades where it really does feel like every year gets worse. Historically, when climate scientists have talked about warming, they’ve predicted a mix of warm years and cool years, and maybe even a decade or two of no warming at all, but I am increasingly skeptical of that prediction. It wouldn’t shock me if there was one or two years in the next 20 that were cooler than the decadal average, or that didn’t have any record-breaking “natural” disasters, but those will be the rarity.

Zoonotic diseases will also almost certainly keep popping up as desperate people start eating whatever they can to survive, and desperate animals start leaving their historic seclusion because their ecosystems are collapsing, and they can’t find food. This is going to be even more of a problem because the people at point of contact are increasingly going to have weakened immune systems from starvation, overheating, and so on.

All of this, as it has throughout history, will fuel war. War, as it has throughout history will cause environmental destruction, which in turn will make it harder to grow food.

Again, as I keep saying, there are ways we could be preparing, and saving lives, and making this process far easier for everyone. Feeding everyone means nobody has to eat wild animals to survive, which means fewer chances for us to catch diseases from animals. That, and making sure everyone has adequate water would go a long way to preventing war, along with a myriad of other crimes. We can shift agriculture indoors, and invest in new kinds of food production. We can invest in cleaning up existing toxic waste, and containing new waste. We can make sure that everyone has access to air conditioning for heat emergencies, and we can ensure that that is powered by renewable energy or nuclear power. We can invest in global access to free vaccination, for any and all diseases. We can reduce childhood mortality, and guarantee quality care for elders, even if not a single person left alive knows who they are. With those two, and universal access to sex ed and contraception, population growth will likely stagnate or decrease, making that less of a problem without a need for mass death. We have the knowledge and resources to do all of that and more.

What we can’t do, is do that while also protecting the wealth and power of our current ruling classes. There is simply too much to be done, to allow for such reckless indulgence. The scale of change matches the scale of the problem, which means that if we want to avoid billions of deaths this century, we need to take coordinated, deliberate action on a scale that has never been achieved in human history, with zero regard for profit or the immature pettiness of that minority whose sole drive in life is the will to power.

As ever, I am aware of the scale and difficulty of what I’m proposing, but what alternate path is less extreme in its consequences?

All we can do is fight for a better world, and since that’s something few of us are accustomed to doing, I continue to believe that we have to start with the basics, even if it seems agonizingly slow and inadequate. We don’t have time to do it halfway.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

It’s Going Down presents: A history of The People’s Park

I don’t know if I’d heard of The People’s Park, in Berkley, California, but I certainly didn’t know the full history. If you’re not familiar with them, It’s Going Down is a good place for news from a decidedly anti-authoritarian perspective.  This history is a great example of what an organized and dedicated community can achieve, if they’re willing to fight for it. The idea that we are powerless can all too easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

 

If you’re near Washington D.C., there’s an action tomorrow that you should try to attend

Now or Never is going to protest the Congressional baseball game at 6pm on July 28th, I’m planning on doing another post about this after the event, but the more people turn up, the better. I don’t know how I didn’t hear about this before today, but now that I know about it, I’ll do what I can to help get the word out.

What is Now or Never? 

We are a new collective, founded because we can no longer accept that our politicians twiddle their thumbs as the world burns. We see this summer as our last chance to pass bold, federal climate legislation. We need our leaders to see that too.

Why are you choosing to engage in direct action?

Because conventional tactics are not enough. Petitions are not enough. Phone calls are not enough. We need a dramatic and confrontational intervention to demonstrate just how serious this is.

We spoke truth to power but power shrugged us off. It’s time to escalate.

Will you still shut down the Congressional Baseball Game if they’ve reached a deal by game time?

If a climate spending bill has passed by then (or if passage is imminent), we will still take action to demand further legislation – this crisis won’t be solved by one bill, no matter how broad. However, we will ensure that our tactics fit the moment we are in. If Congress has passed climate legislation or is on the cusp of doing so, we may use a more conciliatory tactic.

Is this action about Biden, too?

Yes. It is time for him to play hardball.

Will there be a training before the action in which participants can learn how to engage in nonviolent direct action?

Yes. Details about the training will be available soon!

I want to protest the Congressional Baseball Game but cannot risk arrest – can I still come?

Yes.

Why are you announcing this plan publicly? 

Because we need this to be as big as possible.

This is good.

In case it wasn’t clear by now, I’m in favor of yelling at members of Congress over climate change, and doing it at this baseball game is even better. The Republican Party is committed to Christian fascism, with all the horrors one might expect, and they seem to be perfectly happy to drive our entire species to extinction. The Democratic Party responds to this unprecedented evil by bragging about how good they are at being chummy with the fascists. Their inaction has been unacceptable for decades. This game, whatever you think it may have been in the past, is now about normalizing and humanizing fascist politicians. The fact that the Democrats are going along with it is a clear demonstration of just how little they actually care about dealing with climate change. It’s disgusting.

The collective has a clear plan, both for tomorrow’s action, and for further action in August and September. Join tomorrow if you can, and look for ways to help if you can’t.

Americans are eating so much excess meat, their pee is poisoning the water.

I’ve known for a while that the American diet tends to have too much protein. A lot of emphasis is placed on meat, in our culture, and the focus on making U.S.ians lose weight has often guided people to eat fewer carbohydrates, but as much protein as we want. For me, that was compounded by the knowledge that muscle burns more calories than fat, so in my mind, anything I could do to ensure my body could build muscle easily, would also help me burn calories.

The reality is that we humans tend to be fairly efficient creatures, and when we consume too much protein, our body just pisses it away.

Literally.

 Balancing how much protein you eat with the amount your body needs could reduce nitrogen releases to aquatic systems in the U.S. by 12% and overall nitrogen losses to air and water by 4%, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Protein consumption in the United States, from both plant and animal sources, ranks among the highest in the world. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, said that if Americans ate protein at recommended amounts, projected nitrogen excretion rates in 2055 would be 27% less than they are today despite population growth.

The study is the first to estimate how much protein consumption contributes to excess nitrogen in the environment through human waste. It also indicates that coastal cities have the largest potential to reduce nitrogen excretions headed for their watersheds.

“It turns out that many of us don’t need as much protein as we eat, and that has repercussions for our health and aquatic ecosystems,” said lead author Maya Almaraz, a research affiliate with the UC Davis Institute of the Environment. “If we could reduce that to an amount appropriate to our health, we could better protect our environmental resources.”

The human body requires protein. But when a body takes in more protein than it needs, excess amino acids break it down into nitrogen, which is excreted mostly through urine and released through the wastewater system. This brings additional nitrogen into waterways, which can result in toxic algal blooms, oxygen-starved “dead zones” and polluted drinking water.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that eating too much protein can also cause health problems. Kidney stones are first on the list, which makes sense, given what our bodies do with the excess, but when it comes to eating red meat, too much can also increase your risk of colon cancer. We already know that cows in particular are major methane emitters, and livestock in general are more energy-intensive to raise, simply by virtue of being animals, and not plants.

In fact, for all I downplay individual action in favor of systemic change, this is one case where there’s almost certainly no downside. The exception to mention up front is that some people simply need meat to be healthy. That’s one reason I want it to be available, even in my “ideal world”, and why food in general should be free at the point of access, so that those with uncommon restrictions don’t have to pay more just to live. That said, eating less meat would benefit the health and the finances of most U.S. residents.

This is one of those times where a country that valued human life would be funding a PR campaign to this end, but at the very least we can spread the word on our own. This is an easy answer, and honestly it’s one we’ve known for a very long time. As with all dietary advice, your exact needs are going to vary person to person, and the whole reason I like this as a form of individual action is that it’s something that will make people’s individual lives better, and possibly more affordable. That would be nullified if you were to make your diet less healthy.

I also want to say that as someone who’s struggled with his weight for his entire life, I get that changing your diet – especially eating less food – is not always an easy ask. Our bodies make us suffer for losing weight, even if doing so makes us more healthy, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that beyond developing ways to cope.

But personally, I’ve found the combination of environmental impact and overall concern for my health to be a pretty good motivator in getting me to eat less protein in general, and less meat in particular.

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Reminder: Making real progress on climate change would cost less than 1% of global GDP, but we’re still not doing it.

The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.

Boy, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? We need to quadruple what we’re currently investing! What does that look like in terms of what economists call “real numbers?

Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every year in restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (£2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem “services” such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said.

I did badly in calculus. Honestly, most math after basic geometry and algebra was pretty rough for me. I’m saying this because maybe my numbers are off here. It sure seems like what this article is saying, is that in response to a crisis that scientists are increasingly telling us could destroy our civilization within just a few decades, the world is investing 0.025% of its GDP? Am I reading that right?

Seriously, though, I’m not surprised. I should say that this article is from last spring, but this isn’t the first time numbers like this have come up, and I think it’s something worth remembering from time to time. It’s not just that we’re not doing enough, it’s that we’re not even doing the bare minimum. I think that estimation of what would be required is far too low, but we haven’t even tried it. It’s not just that our leaders are too greedy and deluded do use their power to make the world better for everyone, it’s that they can’t even be bothered to decrease their pathological hoarding by even a fraction of a percent. Being rich isn’t enough, they have to be constantly getting richer, and they need to do that faster than anyone else. What’s really mind-boggling to me is that if they did invest their collective trillions in really dealing with climate change, they would become international heroes, and they would still almost certainly be obscenely wealthy. They’d still be rich even if they met my standards, and ended poverty around the world, too.

At this point, I think that the fact that they still haven’t done that means that they’re actually incapable of doing it. That means that it will not happen unless their hand is forced, either by total disaster, or by the masses. They really do seem to be aiming for a world in which they rule a shattered wasteland from their high-tech fortresses. Why else would we still be on this path when it would take so little for them to change our course?

The State of Finance for Nature report, produced by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD), said a total investment of $8.1tn was required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation, reaching $536bn a year by 2050, projected to be about 0.13% of global GDP.

More than that, this analysis backs up one of the points I’ve been hammering for a while now (and I’m far from alone). We need to invest in the protection and stewardship of biodiversity.

More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to the destruction of the natural world, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re last year. Australia, Israel and South Africa were among the most threatened.

The Unep report, which looked at terrestrial nature-based solutions, urges governments to repurpose billions of dollars of damaging agricultural and fossil fuel subsidies to benefit nature and integrate the financial value of nature in decision-making. By 2050, governments and the private sector will need to spend $203bn on the management, conservation and restoration of forests around the world.

“The dependency of global GDP on nature is abstract but what we really mean are livelihoods, jobs, people’s ability to feed themselves, and water security,” said Teresa Hartmann, the WEF lead on climate and nature. “If we don’t do this, there are irreversible damages. The four-trillion gap we describe cannot be filled later on. There will be irreversible damages to biodiversity that we can no longer fix.”

The report follows a warning by leading scientists in January that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” because of ignorance and inaction.

“The way that we use natural resources for food, textiles, wood, fibre and so on, that needs to change,” Hartmann said. “Everybody’s talking about an energy transition at the heart of everybody’s understanding of climate change. Nobody’s talking about a land-use change transition. We cannot afford to continue exploiting and producing as we do now.”

About $133bn is invested in nature every year, often by national governments. Nearly two-thirds of that is spent on forest and peatland restoration, regenerative agriculture and natural pollution-control systems.

The report’s authors said nature and climate should be high on government lending conditions as part of the expansion of investment, also citing the example of Costa Rica’s tax on petrol, which is used to finance its reforestation programme. Private investment in nature-based solutions accounts for only about 14% of the current total, according to the report, which said it needed to be scaled up through carbon markets, sustainable agricultural and forestry supply chains, and private finance.

Ivo Mulder, head of Unep’s climate finance unit, said: “At the moment, emission levels are equal or par to pre-Covid levels. So despite what everybody’s saying, both businesses and governments have been building back as usual.
“The question is: how serious are we about investing in nature-based solutions, both from a government and business perspective? Failing to do so will probably stop us from meeting the Paris climate agreement and deplete biodiversity further.”

This is the flip side of the “we know what we need to do, and how to do it; what’s missing is a desire to do it on the part of those people in whose hands we’ve concentrated most of our species’ collective power. That means that we need to take back that power if we want anything to change, and that – as always – comes down to organizing. I was talking to a friend recently about the frustrations of trying to motivate comfortable people to direct action, and while I still have very little experience myself, it seems like we really do need to start a new kind of political system from scratch. It’s going to be painfully slow, especially as we watch our rulers destroy the world around us, but I don’t see another way forward. The one bit of encouragement I can offer from this is that even if this analysis is far too optimistic about the investment that’s needed, building a better world is still well within our material capacity.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!